Waking up, breakdowns & Agnes
#01—if Sam Harris falls over in a forest, does AI even understand the question?
Welcome to the new format newsletter. If this is a surprise, I outlined what’s in store last week.
🙇♂️ Waking up app
Despite being the target audience, I never tried Sam Harris' Waking Up app. Mostly because I don’t use guided meditations. But one of my favourite non-dual teachers,
, shared her new course with a 30-day free trial and I’ve been using the app since. Her series is a direct exploration of the simplicity of being—more a sustained contemplative exploration than guided meditation—and across the app as a whole, I found the audio production and talk quality to be very high. There’s also beautiful artwork to boot. I’ve listened to ’s two series a few times and they’re also excellent. Gripes: I wish resuming a series was less painful.📉 The importance of breakdowns
The Marginalian reshares Alain de Botton’s (of School of Life fame) insights on what breakdowns mean, and the myth of normalcy:
In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge.
🤖 AI is <INSERT_RANDOM_OPINION>
David Chapman shares a brief rundown on some research that concludes most AI predictions are meaningless. Every shiny new thing has to travel through the often unsubstantiated desires and fears of human psyches.
🎼 A dose of beauty
Tens years after Agnes Obel’s Fuel to Fire became one of my favourite songs, I found my way to a sublime live version. If you vaguely recognise the song, it’s been used in several TV shows, including an episode of The Last of Us.
👨🏼💻 Personal
This week has been spent outlining my coaching offerings—e.g. how I work with founders, people in Tech, those interested in meditation etc—in preparation for updating my website and kicking off a marketing push.
I had a great conversation with Christina Guimond, on TRE, filters, fetters and gargling for throat tension.
I added a Recommended page to my website. I’ll update it each time I recommend things in this newsletter. If you want to see all the books, tools and products I've recommended, check it out.
I also updated my Now page, added a last updated timestamp and created a monthly reminder to keep it current.
—Dan
Stumbled across this, which is apropos: https://riverkenna.substack.com/p/against-ikea-brain
>>I think of it as the “Kingsley-Headspace Spectrum.”
Headspace is the beginners meditation app, of course. It gives clear, direct instructions, moment by moment, step by step. You put in your headphones, and a voice guides you moment-by-moment through the inner tinkering.
Peter Kingsley is a classics scholar and mystic; he writes about the under-attended mystical tradition of the western world, his voice emerging from deep experience in that tradition. The only practice instruction I’ve ever heard from him is “go to a sacred place, lie down, and die.”
Those are the basic ends of the spectrum. You can hold someone’s hand at every single step — even to the point of talking in their ear while they ‘meditate’ — or you can give a couple gnomic phrases and refuse to elaborate.<<